Just moved to Sydney so I'm starting a thread about funny or cool stuff I'm noticing!

"Breakfast burritos" are really stupid.

They say people spend their whole lives looking for love. What about after they find it? Probably they look for good burritos.

There seems to be some interest in this point so I wanted to expand on it a little bit. China as a nation does exert and receive a certain level of influence on and from the rest of the world, but there are two main forces which result in contradiction and confusion among the masses. At the top level of government policy and the "elites," there exists a genuine geopolitical posture of not necessarily aligning but definitely engaging with third worldist, "global south" integration and orienting the country as a leader of the "global south." This force includes everything from diplomatic relations, state led investment in "global south" countries, and Chinese multinational majors like BYD and Huawei making sustained pushes into markets ranging from Southeast Asia to Latin America to the poorer countries of Europe. At the middle level of society, the middle to upper middle classes in first, second, and third tier cities, generally the higher tier the city the lower in socioeconomic class, there is **strong** demand for integration with the West! The demand is so strong it can be characterized as almost a monoculture of wearing a thin facade of superficial "Westernization" motivated by a desire to segregate a "petit bourgeois" identity from the "unwashed masses" of China. This includes everything from blindly favoring Western brands and chains, learning English, striving to send children abroad for school, working for and with Western corporations, contracting with Western firms, traveling to Western countries, and cultivating "Western vibes" in China. The clash of these two forces is one of the most interesting and fundamental contradictions of modern China! The politically and economically powerful first world challenging, third world embracing "elite" vs the economically massive but somewhat politically neutered first world loving, third world shaming hundred million strong "petit bourgeoisie." This contradiction causes mass confusion in the one billion plus remaining masses. For the masses, ignorance about the rest of the world is inherent. The majority of Chinese do not travel abroad, the rest of the world is reduced to an amorphous 国外 or "foreign world." For some, a number that is increasing in the lower ends of China's gargantuan socioeconomic ladder but decreasing at the top ends, the second force manifests as "blind idolization" of anything ostensibly foreign, but shaped by the realities of the "first world," whereas by volume most foreigners and deep foreign ties in China are with the "third world!" There are quirky situations where Africans are ascribed the swag and culture of African-Americans, Latin Americans, Middle Easterners, South Asians are embraced as cool, suave Mediterraneans. Eastern Europeans receive an unhealthy amount of "white privilege" and "white worship." These browns and poor whites are the majority of real on the ground foreign presence in most of China, the exchange students, the import export businessmen, the tourists and modern nomads. The masses are curious about foreigners, they wear "foreign friends" and contact with "foreign things" like badges of honor, but psychologically it's almost like using "third world" foreigners to LARP as first world Westerners, using the realities of what the first force yields to imitate, in an economically inhibited way, the desires of the second force. And all exacerbated by decades, centuries of ignorance about the "foreign."

What if we made really good sex robots and gave them to the most antisocial criminals? Basically like that Toki guy in Fist of the North Star and his ultimate bliss killing attack.

In Australia, the "Greens" party supports Russia. Maybe this solves climate change, by ensuring that more oil and gas gets burned?

Look, I get it. You're rationalists, you're autists, you love to be high decoupling, you love to be high openness, you love to speak truth against social policers. Do you also want power? If you want power, you can't do that as much. You have to choose.

The rape guy's writing isn't even good. It's just edgy. The craft is weak. "Oh, he describes high-emotion events with low-emotion narration, what a goooooood writer!" lol I do worry that my writing skill improved so much that I'm a prose snob now. Need to be careful about that.

"You won't believe this, there's another rape guy in the rationalist discourse" "Uh huh" "This one simple. He rapes and he blogs." "He rapes and he blogs. Okay. About AI safety? CNC?" "No, about the rapes." "What. How is that rationalist?" "Long story, man..."

Incredible content. Jarvis, zoom in

In chatting with mathematicians I've noticed some are pretty myopic about this - they think the mathematical community (or academia) has to respond to this as a separate issue, and miss that whatever those communities do is likely to be a tiny part of a much larger societal response. They frequently seem to have very little awareness of or interest in understanding this

What's the point of learning rare words? You write, "She wore her rebozo" and the reader either thinks you made a typo, looks up the word, thus completely breaking immersion, skips over it, making your choice meaningless, or quits reading. What are you hoping to achieve?

I'm very soupist. If someone doesn't like soup then I don't like them.

These ravens are just fucking around. They don't even know what they want.

I'm noticing a lot of people have a "labor theory of value" specifically for art and nothing else

Twitter is great for training your sentence-level prose control. But you still need to write a big thing to learn structural techniques.

I like the idea that you can have something representing useful knowledge (STEM), and you can add a useless hobby for rich people to steal its reputation, as long as it starts with the right letter